Today’s essential question:How can I create a virtual art gallery in Google Slides?

For our next project, we will create a virtual art gallery to display some of our favorite artwork that we have created. (I designed the above posters in Illustrator a few years ago.) If you have access to Procreate or Photoshop at home, you are welcome to use them. If not, this project can easily be done in Google Slides with the help of the remove.bg app.

Project Requirements:

Virtual Art Gallery created in Google Slides, Photoshop, or Procreate.

Created from at least 10 different images.

Includes at least 3 (more are ok) of your own original artworks. This can include drawings, photos, digital art, animations or video, or even 3D work.

a 150 word artist statement about the project (how you created it, why you chose to include the objects you included)

How to Create a Virtual Art Gallery in Google Slides

STEP 1: OPEN A BLANK GOOGLE SLIDE

You can keep the default page dimensions.

Delete any text boxes so there is nothing on the slide.

STEP 2: COLLECT YOUR IMAGES

Next step is to collect the images for your scene.

For the background, I searched Google for “white brick wall” and “wood floor” and then arranged them on the slide. Be creative with this part – if you want your floor to be made of cotton candy, go for it.

To get your Bitmoji in Google Slides on a computer (not Chromebook), download the Bitmoji Chrome extension. Then, click the Bitmoji icon on your browser bar, select the Bitmoji you want, and drag and drop it onto the slide. To get your Bitmoji in Google Slides on a Chromebook, use the Bitmoji app on your phone, select the Bitmoji you want, and email it to yourself. Then log onto your email on your Chromebook, download the Bitmoji, and insert it in Google Slides.

GOOGLE IMAGE SEARCH TIPS

To help with your image search, there are a few filter tools you need to know about. Filtering your search will allow you to find the images you need a lot quicker (and it’s also a helpful trick to teach students, too!).

Go to Google images and click on Tools. This will bring up a variety of filter dropdowns.

Here are the filters I find most helpful:

To find images that are labeled for reuse, click Usage Rights —> Labeled for reuse.

If you want to find something in a specific color, click Color and select the color you want.

To find images with transparent backgrounds, click Color —> Transparent background. If you can’t find an image you like that fits this criteria, that’s okay — that’s what the remove.bg website is for (but this filter allows us to skip that step).

TO REMOVE A BACKGROUND FROM AN IMAGE:

Save the image to your computer and go to Remove.bg. Click Upload Image and poof – your background is gone. You may need to do a bit of adjusting to remove parts of the background that were missed. If so, click the Edit button below the original image. You can also use this feature to remove annoying text from your Bitmoji.

STEP 3: CREATE YOUR SCENE

Once you have a background and a few images, you can start creating your virtual scene.

A COUPLE EDITING TIPS:

When resizing your images, make sure you are resizing from the corner point of the selected image. This will maintain the height and width proportions of the resized image. If you try to resize from one of the top or side points, the dimensions will not adjust proportionately.

To layer an image below another, right-click and select Order —> Send to back on Google Slides or right-click —> Send to Back on PowerPoint.

Watch the time-lapse below for a glimpse into the process:

When you are done, please submit the following either by posting to your blog or turning it in on Google Classroom:

your finished art gallery

all of the original images you used to create the scene

a 150 word artist statement about the project (how you created it, why you chose to include the objects you included)

Today’s essential question:How do the props and scenery that Weems includes in her photos help tell a more interesting story?

Carrie Mae Weems (born 1953)

In her early twenties, Carrie Mae Weems was politically active in the labor movement as a union organizer. Her first camera, which she received as a birthday gift from her then- boyfriend, was used for this work rather than for artistic purposes. She was inspired to pursue photography only after she came across The Black Photography Annual, a book of images by African-American photographers.

Weems’ award-winning photographs focus on serious issues that face African Americans today, such as racism, gender relations, politics, and personal identity. She has said, “Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country.” More recently however, she expressed that “Black experience is not really the main point; rather, complex, dimensional, human experience and social inclusion … is the real point.”

Today’s essential question:How did the photography of Dorothea Lange help capture the experience of the Great Depression?

DOROTHEA LANGE (1895-1965)

Dorothea Lange was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange’s photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography. Her photograph, Migrant Mother, is the most famous of the FSA photographs. Lange had promised not to publish the photo and use it only to obtain food. Food was indeed rushed to the camp when bureaucrats saw the images, but two of the pictures were published, and one of them become iconic almost overnight. View more of Dorothea Lange’s work at The History Place and the Museum of Modern Art.

If you need to finish your Illustrative Photography project and do not have a tablet with digital painting software, you may want to incorporate some traditional materials like Sydney:

Image Credit: Sydney

Draw your background on a piece of plain white paper. Color it in with whatever you have at home – colored pencils, markers, etc.

Take a photo of your drawn background.

Go to Photopea.com on your Chromebook or computer. Open the photo of your drawn background in Photopea, then follow the instructions below:

To add the photo of your person, go to File -> Open and Place:

That should put the new image in the same file as the rest of your project.

To remove the green background around your person (if you have not done so already), use the eraser tool
If it gives you an error message saying that the layer must be rasterized, right click on the layer in the layers palette on the lower rights side of the screen and select “Rasterize” from the options that pop up.

To move an object, use the move tool

To change the size of an object or rotate it, go to Edit-> Free Transform

Then to save the file and post it to your blog, go to File -> Export As -> PNG

Please email me with any questions. Try to include screen shots if possible.